“I’m not going to win, anyway, Mom,” I said into the phone. “It’s really not worth the fight.”
But at home in Chicago, Mom howled for Dad to come to the phone. “She can’t write!”
“I know,” I heard Dad say. “But they make a decent point.”
“How is that decent? She has to use one hand!”
“But how much longer would be fair, given that? How could they calculate that? I understand it’s sort of impossible for them to be fair to all the other kids. And she’s the one with the injury.”
“Exactly! She’s the one with the injury!”
“Yes, but—”
“This is outrageous. I’m flying out there.”
“Please don’t,” I said into the phone.
“Please don’t,” said Dad.
Mom came back. “I just want you to have a shot at winning,” she told me.
“I know.”
“And you can’t do it orally? Like defending a thesis?”
“Not if writing is part of the evaluation, and it is.”
“But what if you can’t write? How fair is that?”
How sweet it was, I thought cruelly, that Mom somehow had in mind that St. Paul’s was fair.
“I will write left-handed and I will do the best I can.”
Mom was beginning to cry. “All right, love. I know you will.”
But the next day a typed note appeared in my post-office box: Mr. Gillespie was requesting to see me in the chemistry lab that afternoon.
I had never spoken with The Rock. He was, to me, unapproachable and uninterested at the same time, someone who sat and waited for us to fuck up, at which point he decided what portion of our futures we had forfeited. I was the broken-handed, novel-loving humanities girl summoned to meet him in a science building where the doors slammed shut on their own and the walls hummed with unseen machinery.
I found the chemistry lab for the first and last time. The Rock was at one of the high tables, the ones topped with a black waxy substance you could carve with a fingernail. His feet were tucked into the bottom rail of his stool, and he patted the stool beside him.
I hopped up and felt like an impostor, as though my ability to do that belied my injury.
“It’s just a tiny piece of bone at the base of my thumb,” I offered, tapping my cast at the spot where the break would be. Hardly a shipwreck in the South Pacific. I thought he’d appreciate an impression of toughness.
“I understand.”
He had in front of him on the table several plastic tubs filled with Styrofoam balls organized by size and color. “Okay, now,” he said. “Let’s see it.”
I held up my arm, feeling embarrassed by the fact that all of my running had made my cast begin to smell.
“It’s a little bit, um, old,” I told him.
“What’s that?”
“Just, I can’t shower with it.”
He shook his head to dismiss my concern, gripped my cast at the wrist with one hand, and tried half-heartedly to wedge his other fist inside the casted space between my fingers and thumb. This hurt. Then he held his fist up and eyeballed it—first in front of a tub of blue balls, then green. He took a green ball.
“Let’s try this,” he said, and fit the ball inside my casted hand.
It fell to the floor.
I said, “Sorry.”
“Nope. Not carbon. Hang on.” He reached back across his bins and pulled a blue ball, marginally bigger. He set this in my cast. It rested against my thumb, but when I waved my arm, it too fell out.
“Oh, sorry,” I said again.
He ignored this apology too. “Okay, so not oxygen. Hmm.”
He stood up and perused the table. It was odd to be alone in a room with any teacher, but particularly this one. I studied his back. His shoulders were broad and round, with his square head poised between them like a great gate hung on two pillars. His shirt strained against his torso. He was coaching Rick that spring. Also Budge, and so many of the others who had catcalled and propositioned me, who had made every hallway a gauntlet. In an hour or so, this man would be out on the field shouting things that Rick had to obey. It was intoxicating to be near someone who had such power over them. I felt urgently that I should be doing or saying something.
He was murmuring. “I’m just trying to think which will be exactly…”
“Sorry, but what are these?”
He did not turn. “Elements.”
He returned with a larger Styrofoam ball, fire-engine red. “We use them to make models of molecules,” he said, tucking it into my casted hand. It made a small crunching sound as it went in, and held fast. “Bingo.”
With a firm tug on my arm he pulled it out, then took up a sharpened pencil and began to drill it through the center of the Styrofoam.
“You could do all sorts of things with this,” he went on. “A fork. Maybe even a tennis racket.” Once the ball was speared with the pencil, he wedged it back into my cast, pencil lead down, and slid a piece of paper in front of me. “Okay, try.”
I moved my arm, and the pencil moved.
“How about your name?”
I wrote Crawford. I had very little control, but the word was legible.
“Good! That should do it.”
It wasn’t good. Nothing was solved. I could not outprint a preschooler this way. And in fact it hurt, because my hand inside its cast pressed against the ball at the precise spot at the base of my thumb that was broken. But how could I complain to The Rock about Styrofoam? He was on his feet, restacking his bins.
“Okay, thanks,” I said. “Thanks so much.”
“You’re welcome.”
I was desperate for something
